Dark Side of the Moon
The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
For a very brief moment during the 1960s, America was moonstruck. Every boy dreamed of being an astronaut; every girl dreamed of marrying one. But despite the best efforts of a generation of scientists, the almost foolhardy heroics of the astronauts, and 35 billion dollars, the moon turned out to be a place of 'magnificent desolation', to use Buzz Aldrin's words.
In Dark Side of the Moon, Gerard DeGroot reveals how NASA cashed in on the Americans' thirst for heroes in an age of discontent and became obsessed with putting a man on the moon, in the process limiting what could be acheived in space. Drawing on meticulous archival research, DeGroot cuts through the propaganda peddled by the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations - not to mention the NASA spin doctors - and exposes the truth behind one of the most revered myths of American history.
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When President Kennedy announced that the United States would land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, he forced NASA to assume a "faster, cheaper, better" mindset that continues to bedevil it today, says DeGroot (The Bomb: A History). The space agency quickly came up against the budgetary pressures of the Vietnam War and expanding domestic programs, but as DeGroot writes, Lyndon Johnson insisted the U.S. would meet his predecessor's goal, even as NASA's budget was cut every year. DeGroot reveals that engineers turned a blind eye on slipshod components in order to meet impossible deadlines. NASA's public relations machine portrayed its astronauts as wholesome all-Americans even as many of them behaved like rutting frat boys when off duty. The claim has often been made that consumers benefited from the space program, but the author points out that Tang, Velcro and Teflon were invented long before Sputnik was launched. DeGroot writes with 20-20 hindsight, and his sarcasm may put off some readers, although it makes for entertaining reading. Anyone interested in a corrective view to the official hagiographies of the space program will find this acid-etched history hard to put down.
